1 million chess boards and 10,000+ Go binaries

#560 — July 2, 2025

Go Weekly

An Interactive Tour of Go 1.25 — Release Candidate 1 is out, RC2 is expected next week, the draft release notes already make for good reading, and things are on schedule for a final Go 1.25 release in August. What awaits us? Anton presents one of his usual interactive tours packed with code examples you can edit and run from your browser.

Anton Zhiyanov

💡 In a post to golang-announce yesterday, David Chase noted that releases of Go 1.25 RC2, Go 1.24.5 and Go 1.23.11 are due next Tuesday.

The Evolution of Caching Libraries in Go — The developer of the Otter caching library looks at the history of caching libraries in Go, problems developers have had to overcome, and why Otter came into being.

Alexey Mayshev

Fix Go Bugs and Bottlenecks Fast with AppSignal — AppSignal gives Go developers the tools they need to fix bugs, track performance issues, and ship with confidence. Easy to set up, a joy to use, and built for teams that care about their code. Start your free trial today, no credit card required.

AppSignal sponsor

♟️ Running a Million-Board Chess MMO in a Single Process — A surprisingly thorough explanation of how a game developer put together a large scale multiplayer chess game, with Go not skipping a beat on the backend. The developer also recorded a YouTube video all about it. I’m not sure about Black or White but this is certainly a win for Go Blue.

Nolen Royalty

😅 (Ab)using Channels to Implement a 3D Pipe Game — Mischief awaits! If channels can be used as conduits for values, why not use them to implement pipes in a game? Uh oh..

Jun Rong Lam

How to Manage Configuration Settings in Go Webapps — There are many ways to pass configuration to an app (CLI parameters, environment variables, config files), and which one is ‘right’ comes down to your preference and app needs. Alex explains each way along with his preferences.

Alex Edwards

📄 Using Flags for Discoverable Test Config – An exploration of different ways to conditionally enable tests. Redowan Delowar

📄 Why Go Rocks for Building a Lua Interpreter Roxy Light

🛠 Code & Tools

🎨 Colorspace: Color Space Conversion Library — Implements different color space logic to allow for conversions and interpolation of colors. Covers sRGB, linear sRGB, CIE XYZ, OKLAB and OKLCH.

Patricio Whittingslow

Cross-Compiling 10,000+ Go CLI Packages Statically — The tale of building a large number of Go CLI tools as static binaries using the Zig toolchain. Why? To make life easier for folks who don’t have the Go toolchain installed. An interesting, unconventional approach.

Ajam / Package Forge

Depot Ships Gocache v2 for 4x Faster Go Builds — Bundling cuts thousands of network calls down to hundreds. Massive wins for Go builds in CI environments.

Depot sponsor

🤖 MCP Go SDK: Official Go SDK for Model Context Protocol (MCP) — It’s very early days for this project, enough so that it’s considered “unreleased”, but a stable version is expected in August.

Go MCP SDK Authors

ktea: A Bubble Tea-Powered Kafka TUI Client
Jonas Geiregat

Anubis 1.20 – Provides a proof-of-work challenge to 'weigh the soul' of incoming HTTP requests in an attempt to stop/slow down AI crawlers.
Validator 10.27 – Value validations for structs and fields based on tags.
Gofakeit 7.3 – Random fake data generator. Now with ISBN support.
Chroma 2.19 – General purpose syntax highlighter in pure Go.
Mockery 3.5 – Mock code autogenerator.